Qualcomm, a company known for their manufacture of semiconductors, stopped by the Center for Civic Media a few weeks ago to interview people about hackathons. Today, they released the video, which features Nathan Matias and I: Thankfully, all of the words that I say on the screen in the video […]

I’ve been working on online tools for consensus for the last 2 years. Here’s what motivates me to work on this. 1. The water heater For my first five years in Boston, I lived in a housing co-op in Dorchester. It’s a classic Boston triple-decker, which the 13 residents own […]

In an insightful essay at the New Republic, Evgeny Morozov raises a powerful critique of what he describes as “Internet-centrism” in Steven Johnson’s 2012 book Future Perfect. Morozov identifies in Johnson’s book a strain of popular rhetoric which holds that the Internet is a model of decentralization, horizontalism, and leaderlessness, […]

The recent fun tumblr “Charts from the floor of the US Senate” (and Orrin Hatch’s gem) brought this story to mind: One of the formative moments of my youth came from a town hall meeting with Hatch’s colleague, senator Bob Bennett, on the topic of wilderness protection of federal land […]

With the growth of the 99 Percent movement and occupations all over the world, a large number of citizen journalists and activists have turned to real-time video casting services such as livestream, ustream, and justin.tv. Live streaming offers a compelling way to experience a protest on-the-ground as it’s happening – […]

Between the Bars has been busy in the last six months: We now have over 300 writers, and are regularly receiving 100 letters per week We’ve published over 1500 blog posts and profiles. We now have a paid part-time staff person, thanks to the Center for Civic Media’s support, to […]

Something that has been echoed by many of the speakers at today’s Knight Civic Media Conference is the importance of considering who participates in the design of a technology. Sasha Constanza-Chock spoke about the importance of using open technologies and open data when developing tools for communities. Chris Csikszentmihalyi spoke […]

The moment we’ve been working towards for over 3 months has arrived: Between the Bars is back online! We have a selection of new posts from new authors, as well as old posts from long time authors. As we continue to receive permission from the writers to republish their posts, […]

Today, Google Maps is rolling out bicycle directions:http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/03/google-maps-for-bikes There are a number of existing bike map providers, many of which have grown through community-provided, crowd-sourced data. One could argue that these projects have struggled to garner sufficient participation to really take off: http://www.bikely.com/ http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/nyc-bike-map/ http://opentripplanner.org/ http://www.opencyclemap.org/ Now, all at once, […]